It is currently difficult for rapidly growing enterprises to allocate storage from storage systems efficiently and economically. Administrators currently assign fixed amounts of storage to hundreds of different logical volumes and filesystems. In an attempt to meet short and medium term storage demand, the administrator may even intentionally over-allocate storage to each filesystem. Indeed, this method of allocating more storage than immediately needed keeps systems from running out of storage due to a sudden peak in the demand. More often than not, however, the excess storage goes unused and is wasted.
Meanwhile, it is also possible that other filesystems starve for additional storage resources. The administrator who underestimates the growth of a filesystem in an enterprise may have multiple problems to tackle. If the filesystem is almost full then it may not only run out of space but may become unstable or unreliable. The administrator may need to make a complete backup of the filesystem followed by a restoration of the filesystem. Increasing the filesystem size is both time consuming and risky as some data may be lost if the administrator is not careful.
Conventional storage allocation solutions may recognize the downside of wasting storage across in enterprise yet do not have solutions to this complex problem. Those actively administering storage systems need an alternative method to accurately allocate storage in rapidly growing filesystems without reconfiguring and risking data loss.